This Week in Babylon

By Ken Silverstein

A new deputy for the Baghdad badlands? Also: Andrew Young fights back, and the non-fighting Bushes.

Next Stop, Baghdad Station

In December of 2005, Dana Priest of the Washington Post wrote an article about the CIA’s rendition the year before of Khaled Masri, a German citizen. Local police picked up Masri—who claimed he had gone to Macedonia “to blow off steam after a spat with his wife”—because he had a name similar to that of an associate of one of the 9/11 hijackers.

There was no evidence to challenge Masri’s story, but the Macedonians offered him up to the CIA. Then a dispute arose within the CIA—some wanted to wait to see whether Masri’s passport was fake, while a more aggressive faction, led by “a former Soviet analyst with spiked hair” who headed the Counterterrorism Center’s Al Qaeda unit, wanted to interrogate him as soon as possible. The unit head won the argument and Masri was shipped off to a CIA prison in Afghanistan, where, he later claimed, he was tortured. A former CIA official told Priest that the head of the Al Qaeda unit “believed he was someone else. She didn't really know. She just had a hunch.” The hunch, it turned out, was wrong. The CIA subsequently determined that Masri’s passport was genuine and that his rendition had been a terrible mistake. After being held for five months, Masri was released.

Now, I've learned from two sources that the spiky-haired woman herself is a top candidate, if not the frontrunner, to be the new CIA deputy chief of station in Baghdad. Back in January, I reported here that the agency planned to send to Baghdad a controversial new station chief who had played a central role in renditions. That nominee subsequently withdrew himself from consideration, but the botched kidnapping and alleged torture of one measly German apparently hasn't damaged the new candidate for deputy.

The sources I talked to describe the would-be deputy station chief as a person who inspires little confidence, and who is highly adept at working her way through the bureaucracy, but has no leadership ability. However, no one wants to take high-profile positions at Baghdad station, so the CIA is stuck taking whoever is willing to go. “They shouldn’t have to scour the work force to find someone for the hard jobs, but the bench strength is so thin that any warm body will do,” one of the sources told me.

Forever Young

Last month, I wrote a critical article about Andrew Young’s work as a door-opener for firms seeking business in Africa, and now the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has run its own story on the former civil rights leader and United Nations ambassador. (Next up: the New York Times, which has been working on a lengthy profile of Young for some time that should be published soon.) The story by the Journal-Constitution quoted Omoyele Sowore, a Nigeria-born journalist, as saying that Young’s firm, GoodWorks International, “represents all these oil companies that have been involved in massive human rights abuses and pollution of the environment in Nigeria.” And it quoted another incisive analyst (me) describing the primary beneficiaries of Young’s work in Africa as “these corrupt, authoritarian regimes he works with and his private corporate clients.”

Young dismissed the criticism and told the newspaper that I don’t “understand the world in which we live . . .  He's still trying to redistribute wealth that isn't there.” Young had more of the same to say when he called me to complain about the story. The key to growth, he told me, was the private sector and his firm was trying “to help Africa attract foreign investment” and encourage local businesses. Furthermore, GoodWorks had hired young nationals to run its offices in Africa and that it has tried to reinvest profits in the countries where it operates. “You can make more money honestly in a growing economy than you can steal in a dying economy,” he said. In other words, Young is doing well by doing good.

Young, I must say, was far more pleasant when he called me than I would have been in the same position. That said, I don’t buy his argument. Sure, an honest, well-intentioned government could use revenues generated by the private sector to spur economic development and alleviate poverty. The regimes Young works with—Nigeria is a primary client and he also has ties to the disgusting government of Angola—don’t match that description. “Global oil is a mixed picture, predominantly negative, and African oil is the most negative of all the stories,” David Gordon, head of the CIA's Office of Transnational Issues, said at an energy conference I attended a few years ago. Gordon said that he had traveled to Nigeria and that the consensus among people he spoke with was that the country would have been better if its oil had been left in the ground, a reasonable conclusion when one considers that Nigeria has exported more than $200 billion worth of oil during the last few decades, but the overwhelming majority of its people live in poverty. Under those circumstances, Young’s arguments are naïve—at best.

The Bush Family at War

From Kitty Kelley’s can’t-miss op-ed Monday in the Los Angeles Times:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed how the power of good example could also be powerfully good politics. When he led the country to sacrifice in World War II, his children enlisted and his wife traveled to military bases to counsel and comfort the families of soldiers. Newsreels showed the president's four sons fighting with the Marines in the Pacific, flying with the Army Air Forces in North Africa and landing with the Navy at Normandy . . .

The contrast between FDR's good example during wartime and that of George W. Bush is stark and sad . . . The president tells us Iraq is a “noble” war, but his wife, his children and his nieces and nephews are not listening. None has enlisted in the armed services, and none seems to be paying attention to the sacrifices of military families. Until Jenna's trip to Panama [where she briefly interned for UNICEF], the presidential daughters performed community service only when mandated by a court after they were cited for underage drinking. Since then they have surfaced in public during lavish presidential trips with their parents, bar-hopping outings in Georgetown and champagne-popping art openings in New York.

The first lady, so often lauded for her love of literacy, has not been seen in the reading rooms of veterans' hospitals . . . The presidential nieces and nephews also have missed the memo on setting a good public example. Ashley Bush—the youngest daughter of the president's brother, Neil, and Neil's ex-wife, Sharon—was presented to Manhattan society at the 52nd Annual International Debutantes Ball at the Waldorf Astoria. Her older sister, Lauren, a runway model, told London's Evening Standard that she is a student ambassador for the United Nations World Food Program, but she would not lobby her uncle for U.S. funds. Her cousin, Billy Bush, chronicles the lives of celebrities on “Access Hollywood.”

The Blonde and the Bombshell

It was a wonderful week on The Daily Show, with two standout clips. First, Jon Stewart defines what CNN meant in describing Valerie Plame as “compelling.” And second, Doris Kearns Goodwin shreds former UN ambassador John Bolton.